Republished from artkillingapathy.com with permission Remember when that Presidential Candidate was taken to a black site, cuffed to a chair and forbidden to attend the Presidential Debates? For those of you who…

When your login and password are both “admin” these sort of things will happen, but the sheer incompetence of the Washington D.C. election board with electronic voting systems is frightening. Via Geekosystem:

Sure, widespread electronic voting would make the process of tallying and processing ballots exponentially easier, but can it ever really be secure? Maybe someday, but certainly not right now, as evidenced by a little experiment in Washington D.C. that ended with everyone’s favorite robo-sociopath Bender Bending Rodriguez being elected as the head of the Washington D.C. school board. Needless to say, there was a little bit of hacking involved.

Before we go any further, its worth noting that there was hacking involved partially because the Washington D.C. election board was asking for it. Literally. During the election in question, the election board actually invited all comers to try and break into the system as a test of its security. Among others, a team from University of Michigan took a crack at it, and cracked the system wide open …

Marking President’s day today, February 20th, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of active duty troops and veterans will descend on Washington DC and the White House to show support for Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. Organized by the group, Veterans for Ron Paul 2012, the march will see military personnel march from the Washington Monument to the White House in an effort to generate media coverage of Paul’s ongoing campaign, and highlight the fact that Paul has received more donations from active duty military than all other GOP candidates combined, as well as Obama.

Reports the AP via NPR: Flanked by police scooters, about two dozen Occupy Wall Street protesters started a two-week walk from New York to Washington on Wednesday. The activists left Manhattan’s Zuccotti…

The earthquake didn’t cause widespread damages or injuries, but it did put a crack in the Washington Monument. After unconfirmed reports suggested the monument was tilting, park officials said Tuesday night that the 550-foot obelisk suffered a crack in the 5.8-magnitude rumble centered in Mineral, Va., near Charlottesville.

Inspections conducted by helicopter found a crack “at the very, very top” of the monument, park service spokesman Bill Line told The Washington Post, and the monument and plaza surrounding the structure will be closed indefinitely as it is examined.

Though it suffered damage, the monument isn’t leaning, the Park Service said. The Park Service has also temporarily closed the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial pending further inspection, while other landmarks — including the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial set to be officially unveiled this weekend — remain open.

I wonder how Thomas Jefferson would have felt about this. Via the Huffington Post:

The dancers were protesting an appeals court ruling handed down last week that the national monuments are places for reflection and contemplation — and that dancing distracted from such an experience.

In 2008, Mary Brooke Oberwetter and a group of friends went to the Jefferson to commemorate the president’s 265th birthday by dancing silently, while listening to music on headphones. Park Police ordered the revelers to disperse and arrested them when they did not.

Oberwetter sued on free speech grounds, but the appeals court ruled last week that her conduct was indeed prohibited “because it stands out as a type of performance, creating its own center of attention and distracting from the atmosphere of solemn commemoration” that Park Service regulations are designed to preserve.

Saturday’s protest was staged during the day, on Memorial Day weekend, in order to draw maximum attention:

This should be more troubling, but it feels like business as usual in Washington. Dan Foomkin writes on the Huffington Post: Members of the House of Representatives considerably outperform the stock market…

Enough with the marches already! Ed O’Keefe reports on yet another march on Washington, for the Washington Post: Amid growing dissatisfaction with federal employees, a group of younger, web-savvy feds are planning…

The recent rally led by Glenn Beck brought together an interesting assortment of characters, and with them ideas. The New Left Media recorded various interviews with some of the attendees. More interesting than what bizarre claims they make, most had wrong or speculated information, yet not a single person cited a source from where their information was coming from. Of course except the one women who receives her immigration “facts” from her sister.

A frosty winter weekend offered a perfect chance for DC Metro riders to observe what has become an annual ritual of shedding their pants on the subway. No Pants Day began as a prank by a few riders in 2002 and has developed a following of thousands of people in over 40 cities worldwide.